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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Which graphics card is now recommended for the new Mac Pros for the RED?

Stephen Pruitt

Stephen Pruitt

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I know several folks have written on this in the not-to-distant past, but it's time for me to investigate further and make a move. It seems as if the key players are the ATI HD 2600s, the NVIDIA 8800GT and the NVIDIA FX5600.

If I'm just interested in REDability, which one is the best?

Thanks much.

Stephen
 
I'd also like to know the answer.

Even if the only official answer I can get is, "When rendering to DPX from RedCine, the nVidia 8800GT is around 15% faster than the stock ATI 2600HD...."

or "... is less than 10% faster...."
 
Sorry guys but I think the code base for REDALERT or REDCINE is not GPU intensive but CPU intensive...Graeme coould probably confirm that. I swear I'm wrong...
 
REDALERT is CPU based

REDCINE is GPU based
on a mac it works fine with an ATI Card.
but the new MacPro comes only with a 256 mb card.

The N`vidia has about 1 Gb.

Normally N`Vidia on a Mac means slower render times, but if the GPU RAM is so much higher i dont know anymore.

Best would be if apple writes the proper driver for N`Vidia ( what i dont understand why they are not doing it, because everything they sell (Macbook pro/Mac Pro) can be delivered with a better N`Vidia card.
 
I went with the FX5600 and... WOW... Also, using 32GB of RAM and the KONA 3 card.

The files I play with love it all so far.
 
Hey, Kow. . .

Have you had any difficulties with REDCine or REDAlert files at all with that card????

Thanks so much.

Stephen
 
I have the 8800GT in my new mac pro. I have seen no evidence of the current nVidia drivers being slow. This card screams along just great in every application I've run. I would take this card any day over the ATI 2600HD.

As for the FX5600... I would not recommend this to anyone unless they have specific need for the extra functionality. If you have to ask what the extra functionality is, then there's a 99% chance you don't need it. It's really no faster than the 8800GT and all that extra onboard memory is going to do nearly nothing for REDCINE or most applications that are not intensive on large 3D geometry or texture data sets. You will gain a lot more render speed by saving your money and getting the 8800GT and buying another system to aid in the rendering.

REDCINE does use the GPU, but doesn't seem to benefit highly from it. I think it's only processing some of the color data and little else. It also doesn't seem to scale well across multiple CPUs. I haven't had a chance to do serious CPU profiling or benchmarking with it. A couple times I have started to do so, it crashes as it dislikes much else running at the same time, especially other apps that produce any real display output while REDCINE is running. Maybe this weekend I'll take another look at it as I'll be back in town and in the presence of my workstation again.
 
Chalk up some more great reasoned advice from Jeff Kilgroe.

Thanks, Jeff. . .

Stephen
 
Stephen Pruitt said:
Hey, Kow. . .

Have you had any difficulties with REDCine or REDAlert files at all with that card????

Thanks so much.

Stephen
Click to expand...

No difficulties with REDCINE, but I don't really use REDALERT.

I chose this card because I also run AE and SHAKE constantly - and yes, it helps tremendously.
But I also attribute a lot of this to the KONA 3 card as well. There's little talk on the forum (as far as I can see) about capture cards and their uses in editing systems. Believe me, there's more use for them than "just capturing".
 
Okay, Kow. . . enlighten me. . . what is a Kona 3 card?

Stephen
 
The Kona3 is awesome, but I just want to offer this up as clarification. The Kona3 card provides on-board processing for uncompressed QT, HDV, DVCPRO[HD] and ProRes 422 -- in supported applications. It also can acelerate many Apple FCS Dynamic RT functions. It unfortunately does not speed up processing of anything in REDCINE or RED Alert / REDLINE. It does not offer any benefits to the R3D QT Proxies.

As for the FX5600, I haven't been able to do any speed testing of my own as I don't have an FX5600 equipped Mac to test with. But most benchmarks I've seen from similarly clocked cards (5600 & 8800GT) in Windows land and a few posted benches for the Mac, places it about 10-15% faster than the 8800GT card in intensive 3D computations and about 5-10% faster in overall performance. In the end, some will buy it because they need the genlock ability or additional hardware functions for specific software (none of which are used by REDCINE, AE, Motion, etc..). Not to pick on you directly Kowboy, but Shake doesn't make use of any GPU functions or GPU rendering ability. Even a generous 10% overall faster performance assumption translates into very little speed increase in applications like REDCINE, Motion, etc.. Or other apps that don't extensively use the GPU. REDCINE doesn't benefit much from the 8800GT over the ATI 2600HD. It just doesn't make that extensive or efficient use of any GPU functionality. For someone looking to boost REDCINE performance, or speed with the Apple pro apps, that money needed to upgrade to the 5600 would be much better spent on other things. ...Just my $0.02.


Each buyer will have to decide for themselves what card will benefit them most. The Quadro 5600 is the top card for the Mac right now and it comes at a hefty price. As I wrote above, I wouldn't recommend it unless someone has specific need of its unique hardware features or just has extra money to burn... At least not for an editing / compositing workstation. Now if you're going to be running Maya on this workstation at least 20 hours a week, then I would probably highly recommend considering the 5600.
 
Jeff Kilgroe should recive a free Scarlet for all the support he provides!!! ;)
 
I couldn't agree more!

Stephen
 
Okay. . . last question: What is a "Fibre Channel Card" and do I need one?

Okay. . . last question: What is a "Fibre Channel Card" and do I need one?

I think that's the last option I know nothing about. What's it do? Does it play into RED workflow?

:-)

Thanks much.

Stephen
 
It does if you have a RAID / networksolution / SAN that supports it...


It's one of those "if you don't know what it is, you probably don't need them yet" things :)

Gunleik
 
Are you telling me that I don't need my RED?

:-)

Seriously, how would one use that Fibre Channel Card??? I'll be needing about 8TB of memory this summer.

Stephen
 
The fiber channel card is an interface card for fiber optic communication. Many external RAID systems will use fiber channel as a connectivity option. Fiber channel is a popular interface for very dense and high-speed networking, SAN applications, that sort of thing. FC is a very easy and robust interface, but also a bit expensive considering that eSATA and SAS can provide all the same benefits if only considering storage solutions and not network applications.

If you are buying a Mac Pro now, don't worry about the fiber channel option unless you need it now. Such things are easily added later and one you pick now may not fit your needs in 6 months when you go to buy a new RAID. In the end, you may find that an eSATA, SAS or InfiniBand system may fit your needs better.
 
Kilgroe to the rescue. . . again. . .

Mucho, mucho danka!

Stephen
 
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